


leanover

by ballantine



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath, Bruce Banner-centric, Depression, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-25 02:44:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14967401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: After Wakanda, Thor sleeps sixteen hours a day and Bruce contemplates what it takes to be a person in a broken world.





	leanover

 

_**BURY THIS BODY IN PLACE OF THE ONES I COULDN'T** _

The note sat delicately in the woman's slack grip, fluttering slightly and risking becoming dislodged in the breeze. Paperclipped to it was a photograph of the woman smiling next to a man and an adolescent boy.

It took only a few minutes for anyone to notice the body and kick up enough of a fuss to catch the attention of the perimeter guard and call for paramedics, by which point the whole scene had been photographed and shared a dozen times over.

The images made the AP and trended online, but truthfully, it was hard to gauge the impact amidst all the other stories of chaos in the country and around the world. The protests outside the Avengers compound grew in size afterwards, but they'd been growing steadily with every new day since the first.

When the quinjet returning from Wakanda approached the Avengers compound, it broke low out of the cloud cover to skim above the treeline and was met with a crowd of a couple thousand.

* * *

**The Avengers**

Colonel Rhodes was the one who finally called an official meeting of the Avengers, or whatever the hell they were now, whatever was left of them.

They were back on American soil, at a compound Bruce had seen designs for but never visited in person. Looking around, he recognized Tony's fingerprints on every room; the first time he walked into the labs, he had to turn around and leave again immediately.

They were all at the meeting, except for the ones who weren't. Bruce, Rhodey, Nat, Cap –

"Where's Thor?" Rhodey asked, frowning.

"Uh – sleeping, I think." Bruce glanced around the table at the three equally exhausted faces looking back at him. "He was kind of vague," he hadn't been vague; in typical Thor fashion, he'd been disconcertingly straightforward, "but from what I gather, after his ship was blown up by Thanos, he went to some kind of cosmic blacksmith? And held open an energy gate in the path of a neutron star with his bare hands."

He finds it strange to be explaining this now, so many days after the fact. It felt like a year had passed, and he was trying to gossip over old news, or whatever people did in normal office environments.

And, anyway, he was kind of lying; he was pretty sure Thor was sleeping so much because he was depressed. Bruce recognized the move, even in an alien god.

"Oh. Right," Rhodey said after a moment, returning to his agenda.

"Will he be all right?" asked Steve, dragging himself out of his mute misery long enough to sound almost disturbed.

Bruce considered the question briefly. Broadly speaking, he knew Thor's body would have been subject to incredible amounts of heat and radiation, not to mention crushing magnetic force. NASA didn't even have proper observational equipment that could handle what Thor put himself through.

"I'm sure he just needs to sleep it off," he said.

The rest of the meeting was kind of a disaster, even by usual Avengers standards. No one threw a punch or drew a weapon, but Bruce was hesitant to put that down to anything but shock and, to be honest, the very loud absence of Tony.

Rhodey kept pausing mid-sentence, as if in anticipation of a smartass comment, but it never came. The skin around his eyes was looking pinched. He was clinging to his military forbearance so hard, Bruce almost found himself addressing him as _sir_.

As for the others, Steve was tight-lipped, short on words, and Nat had long since retreated behind her old mask of Russian stoicism.

They were all too aware of the missing bodies in the room. The Avengers had barely been a team before; now they were just four people.

Ultimately the meeting's conclusion was pretty simple. They couldn't do anything until they located Thanos, so they did what the Avengers did best – they split up.

Within an hour, Nat was gone, off to track down Fury, Hill, and Clint, if they were still out there to be tracked. Steve left to return to Wakanda and help with recovery efforts, which conveniently offered him both maximum distraction and guilt potential. Who was Bruce to scoff at his need for either.

Rhodes spent half his time at the compound and the rest of his waking hours putting out fires in the United States military chain of command. Bruce didn't know who or how many people they lost, or what the state of the government was, and he didn't particularly care to find out.

Bruce stayed at the compound. His only job was to find a way to track the energy signature of the infinity stones, an almost impossible task that needed to be accomplished before they could begin to tackle the even more impossible task of figuring out how to kill Thanos.

The only good news was that he had as much time as he needed. The worst had already happened. If they ultimately succeeded, all of this could be undone. Bruce had a lifetime to figure out how to unbreak the universe.

He persuaded Thor that he needed his knowledge of the galaxy, and Thor brought along the raccoon on similar logic, and soon enough the labs at the Avengers compound became a way station for physicists, engineers, astronavigation specialists, and a pair of alien beings, all of them working to distract themselves from the inescapable fact that it was already too late.

* * *

Thor slept enough for three men, which was just as well because no one else was really doing much in the way of sleeping.

Bruce didn't know if it was the same for everyone else at the compound, if they saw them in their sleep every night, relived those moments where they crumbled away and then woke up sputtering and spitting, terrified thinking there was grit in their mouth that had once been a friend.

Bruce was no stranger to poor sleep. Between renegade quinjets and bifrosts and two years, apparently, of being smothered by the Hulk's subconscious, he was never absolutely sure of where he'd wake up and what would meet him when he did.

So it's four, it's five, it's seven in the morning and Bruce is officially keeping Tony hours.

He doesn't have a Pepper to pull him away, and Friday's reluctant to say or do anything to distract him from his work. (He always had his suspicions about Tony's motley crew of AIs and robots; he wondered if the man knew he'd built something that had the capability of missing him, if maybe that had secretly been the point.)

But eventually he did have to sleep, and it was just a short walk up to his room, to where Thor was already sprawled out over the bed.

Thor had his own assigned rooms, of course, but both in the tower and on this compound they sat empty. It had always been just as easy for Thor to travel back to Asgard or stay with doctors Foster or Selvig. Thor loved visiting people.

Neither Foster nor Selvig had made it, otherwise they likely would have been here with the rest of them, searching for a way out of this. Bruce couldn't think too long or hard about all the knowledge the world had just lost; it made him see green.

He also didn't know what currently made _his_ empty rooms more appealing than Thor's own lavishly appointed quarters. He'd only just moved in, and yet it somehow already resembled a workaholic bachelor pad, minus obscene amounts of takeout containers. But he didn't ask. One didn't question anyone else's weird behavior, these days.

He hasn't shared a bed with anyone in years. He certainly never expected to share one with someone like Thor.

Thor was not a soft bedfellow – if Bruce rolled over too far, it was a bit like turning into a wall. At least after the first and second nights he stopped wearing his armor into bed. One morning, Bruce found it unbuckled in a pile a few feet away. He tried folding it up respectfully; failed; eventually set it down on the dresser and lamely patted it, like one would a retired flag or, or a dog.

"You know, all these years, I wasn't sure you needed to sleep." It was the closest Bruce came to asking him about the whole situation, because yeah, it was weird, but it somehow felt weirder to talk about it.

"I sleep," said Thor, as if he hadn't by then ably demonstrated this by lying comatose for sixteen hours a day. He rolled onto his back and gazed at the ceiling. From this angle, Bruce could barely tell that his eyes no longer matched.

"There is a garden outside the Hall of Valhalla on Asgard where the goddess Idunn maintains an orchard. A bite of one of her apples, and I don't need to sleep, or eat anything else – I can eat an apple and continue battling for a fortnight.”

Bruce didn't blink at his slip in tense. They all did it. "Apple of eternal war, huh? Sounds like it beats out Red Delicious."

So Thor stayed in his rooms, and Bruce told himself he could use a roommate.

* * *

**Nat.**

Bruce didn't pretend to understand Natasha. It was his sole saving grace, that he didn't pretend, though sometimes he thought they both wished he could.

He'd thought, once – what felt simultaneously like a week and years ago, and was somehow _both_ – that the desire to understand might pinch-hit for the real thing. He was a scientist; time and trials would empower him where intuition couldn't. But studies like that required stability and controlled conditions, and he'd been kidding himself that a timeshare life with the Hulk could include either.

Before that day, that _hour_ in Wakanda, when Bruce had met Natasha's eyes for the first time again, he'd been greeted with a faint wistfulness, like he was a distant reminder of a nice dream she once had. It hurt worse than if she'd been angry, but even that was preferable to now: him watching her back away from him, from Steve, from _everyone_.

The ramifications of that day went deeper than those they lost – it cracked the world open and tore out great chunks of their filaments and wiring, their ability to _connect_ with one another. The news was full of divorces and suicides, people giving up on reaching out because of the devastating, _crippling_ suspicion that the person on the other side might vanish before they could reach back.

They'd talked once of disappearing together, but now the world had disappeared on them.

They'd missed their window.

* * *

Bruce was working on the bed, sitting up against the headboard. He didn't exactly know why he hadn't gotten up and headed over to the lab, except the data from yesterday had all been useless and he couldn't quite face the anxious people in there yet. He was also quietly ignoring the feeling that his reluctance had something to do with the figure sprawled out beside him.

"Wish we could get pizza," said Bruce distractedly, trying to focus on his tablet. “Tony can get pizza delivered anywhere, I never know how he does it.” Okay: sickeningly vast reserves of money was probably how he did it, and Bruce probably should've stopped being amused by his constant carefree spending, but hey: pizza.

“Can you not order someone to bring this pizza to you?” asked Thor without moving or even opening his eyes. Bruce hadn't been sure he was even awake.

“No. Short of using the quinjet, we can't leave. And I'm not asking some poor kid to come here.”

Such unequivocal denial, or perhaps the tone used to communicate it, spurred Thor into lifting his head. He opened his eyes and looked at Bruce, who glanced away from his tablet for the sheer novelty of being able to look down at him.

"Why?"

"Thor – there are protestors covering every entrance. It's a mess. I mean," he said, "we could fly over them, but it's generally been agreed that 'ostentatious displays of power' be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Like Thanos reappearing necessary." And by _generally been agreed_ , he meant that Nicole their PR consultant had ordered it.

"Are these protestors formidable?" Thor said the word _protestor_ in about the same unfamiliar tone one might expect from a member of a multi-millennia-old royal dynasty.

"Formidable?" Bruce wasn't prepared to introduce Thor to the power of civil disobedience. "No – well, _yes_. Yes, it can be a good – look, it's just not like that, okay? This isn't a situation that calls for – " he stalled out.

"Vanquishing?" Thor offered around a huge yawn. He turned onto his stomach, already losing interest again.

"Right. No vanquishing needed." Bruce sighed and gave up on the tablet. "Besides, you haven't moved from this bed in like twelve hours."

Thor turned his face stubbornly into his pillow, but his left arm crept up under the sheet and then he had Bruce's kneecap in a light grip that Bruce tried and failed not to immediately focus all his attention on.

"I could still vanquish them," he said. "I'm – well rested."

It was absurd, really, how easily Thor's hand encompassed his knee. "You. What?"

“If they become a problem, I can handle it.”

And that was objectively kind of a gross statement, but all Bruce could think was that this was suddenly all very weird. Like, sure, you could sleep in the same bed as another guy, but this touching thing, it was –

Bruce reached up and gently touched Thor's head, felt the short bristles of his hair beneath his palm. Okay, so he was stroking him, a little; Thor's hand went soft against his knee.

"I'll tell the PR woman," Bruce said. "I'm sure she'll be glad to have a backup plan."

“Nicole Pujols,” Thor mumbled at his hip.

“What?”

“Our minister of information – ”

“PR consultant.”

“Her name is Nicole Pujols.”

He wondered how the hell Thor even knew that, given that he'd barely left Bruce's rooms. But Thor fell back asleep before he could ask, and the tablet full of data in Bruce's lap was waiting for him, and he never did get a pizza.

* * *

**Cap**

The black fury and despair in Steve's eyes had made Bruce flinch back, scalded by recognition.

Bruce had known Sam only a little, and the Winter Soldier not at all, but he barely had to see Steve with either of them to know what they meant to him; he was a far cry from the lonely, shellshocked man he'd met on the helicarrier in 2012.

He wondered how often Steve thought about his chances of a long life, the way Bruce did. If he looked at the years ahead, wondering how far they might stretch, if there was a limit to the losses he would have to endure.

Call it guilt or call it cowardice, and Bruce was willing to call it both, but he couldn't help Steve. He couldn't help anyone, not with this.

He's not a therapist, he once told Tony. Half-apologizing, because it was always an implicit admission of failure as a friend. He barely had a handle on his own shit most days, so the idea of trying to deal with someone else's filled him with helpless dread.

Bruce was in constant communication with the teams of people back in Wakanda, those who were working on salvaging what they could from the outriders' landers, extracting and cracking alien tech that no one on the planet had seen before. Before Steve left to return there, Bruce slipped up and asked him what the plan was – because some part of him still believed it was the year 2015, and Steve Rogers always had a plan.

Steve said, "We find Thanos and Thor chops his head off. We take that gauntlet and then, maybe." He stopped before he could say it, flat blue eyes fixing sightless on the opposite wall, and Bruce found that the only thing he could do was let him leave the room.

Tony talks so much, Steve so little, and there was nothing Bruce could do for either of them.

* * *

Thor took to wearing a pair of Bruce's sweatpants, one of the many articles of clothing Tony made for him special, because Bruce had the kind of life that required special sweat pants, and the kind of friend who not only thought of it but spent twelve hours engineering the additions to his wardrobe.

Bruce has yet to hulk out during the night, so the garment largely went untested. He thought briefly about the look on Tony's face when he tells him that the sweats stretched perfectly to fit Thor, and was at least able to wring a small grin out of that as he went to sleep.

He woke up from the nightmares two hours later, to the sound of thunder rolling overhead.

When he slept, his dreams intermixed with the Hulk's and the resulting maelstrom of bright colors and loud noises was like a bad acid trip, everything heightened to a degree just beyond bearable.

And then, of course, there was the violence.

In his dreams, he crushed a screaming creature's spine with his fist, grinding it down until it was nothing so much as homogeneous detritus that could mix with the dirt underfoot. When he jerked awake moments later, he'd find his hand wrapped around Thor's wrist. He would take deep shuddering breaths, almost squeezing out a few tears with relief that he couldn't do anything to hurt this one body.

Outside, the thunder cracked the sky open again. Bruce wondered if the protestors were still out there.

“Thor,” he whispered. “Is this you?”

But Thor slept on, like the storm was nothing.

* * *

**The Raccoon**

The raccoon was a terrible house guest.

He got into everything, and he stole about half of it. In the first couple days, he'd snarl and cuss at people's poorly-concealed shock at his appearance, but soon enough he learned that he could make most people melt like ice cream if he just played at being sweet and harmless.

“You know he carries a machine gun,” Bruce said to Emily and Matt, two of the xenocryptology technicians on loan from one of the clandestine government agencies he'd long since lost track of.

Emily couldn't bite back her excited grin. “Was it bigger than him?”

Bruce just looked at her.

“That's so _cute_ ,” said Matt fervently.

Bruce generally tried not to cross paths with Rocket any more often than he had to, but since Thor had apparently bonded with him, that meant he _had_ to roughly once a day.

Bruce was in one of the kitchens, struggling to open a jar of spaghetti sauce and feeling like he might Hulk out if it didn't come loose soon, when Rocket sauntered over, hopped up onto the counter, and said:

"So I hear you turn into some kind of giant green rage monster."

Bruce eyed him, wondering how rude it would be to tell him no animals on the counter. "It comes and goes."

Rocket slid a drawer open with his foot and started rummaging around. "Sounds useful. That normal for you humans? Quill's impossible to get anything out of that's not flat nonsense."

"No, I was – it was a lab experiment. An accident."

Rocket looked up. Something had changed in his expression, but Bruce couldn't read it well enough to parse. Sympathy, maybe? Impossible to tell under the fur.

His tone, however, was pretty clear. "Someone did this to you?"

"No," Bruce said. With a loud pop, the jar's lid finally came off, saving the kitchen from any Hulk-related damage. "I did it to myself."

* * *

All the anger was burnt out of Thor, and Bruce, whose days begin and end with anger, whose life is measured by its swells and ebbs, racking it away like trying to bottle the ocean – Bruce didn't know what to do with that.

He had long hours now to mull over his thoughts and memories. The computer next to him was running vector simulations with the preliminary data from the outrider landers, leaving Bruce to turn idly on one of the spinning stools Tony always stocked his labs with, and think about his friend.

He wondered if Tony would have been better if he hadn't so clearly taken Bruce's cue to repress and sublimate. Maybe they wouldn't have created Ultron, and there never would have been a Vision to worry about killing. And maybe Bruce should be disturbed by this line of thought, because Vision had been a _person_ , hadn't he, and he'd died, and who was Bruce to question the _point_ of that, to assign value and causation so bloodlessly while sitting here on this stool, in a lab so like the one where Vision had come into being.

The computer trilled, simulation complete. Bruce put his glasses back on and bent over the station.

* * *

**Rhodey**

Rhodey stopped by the lab on one of his trips to the compound. He was plainly uncomfortable, standing in the doorway and deliberately not looking around at all the spaces where Tony wasn't.

“The crowd outside seems to have stabilized,” he said.

Bruce could see the encampment from the window in his room every morning. He said, “There's still got to be almost a thousand people out there.”

Rhodey nodded in weary agreement. “But it's not getting any bigger.”

He took of his glasses for the purpose of cleaning them and having an excuse to not look at Rhodey when he asked, “Have we decided what we're going to tell them yet? It's been several days.”

“I've briefed a dozen different governments and intelligence agencies.”

Bruce grimaced. After a moment he said, "I realize I'm talking to the wrong person here, but should we really keep this kind of thing from people? You know – regular, normal people?"

Just about the only communication anyone had received about the disappearances came in the form of paperwork. Every person now carried an unseen baggage, a weight that could be recorded in black and white on hastily-created government forms: where were you when it happened? How many people did you lose? What was their sex, their age, their race? It was history's most depressing census.

The forms didn't ask about anything that wasn't quantifiable. Bruce didn't know how anyone could stand to fill them out; his own were put through the shredder in the corner of the lab. He wondered what Rhodey did with his.

Neither of them could put Tony down. For all they knew, he and Strange were still out there, cut off from home.

Rhodey didn't speak for several moments, forcing Bruce to finally look up and meet his eyes.

He said slowly, "How do you explain to someone who watched their whole family crumble around them that it all happened because a giant purple man from another planet simply snapped his fingers? How do you expect anyone to not go crazy from the very idea?"

“So – it's better to let them think, what, that _God_ did this?”

Rhodey shut his eyes. "We have madness in the streets. It's already bad out there – this would break it beyond repair.” He paused and took a short breath. Licked his lips and continued, “They'll never have to know, and it's for the best. If we can get that gauntlet – no one will have to know this happened."

Bruce rubbed his hands restlessly together. "We don't even know if any of us can wield that thing. And we won't, not until we get a chance to study it."

"Thor might be able to use it." Rhodes said. “Man withstands the power of a neutron star, I say we let him give it a shot.”

"Yeah, maybe." Bruce's mouth twisted with a thought. "But wouldn't we be asking him to bear the burden of remembering this whole mess? Everyone else gets to forget but him?"

Rhodes didn't speak for several seconds, caught by the thought and staring into space. It didn't matter that he didn't know Thor that well – it was an ugly fate for anyone.

"All we can do is ask," he said finally, and that ended both the conversation and his visit.

* * *

“Thor,” Bruce said, standing beside the bed, “I am telling you this as your friend: you stink. You need to shower.”

Mild outrage sparked in Thor's face as he sat up, but Bruce was unmoved. The right side of Thor's hair was flattened, and Bruce had seen this kind of thing before in grad school; sometimes people who've had long hair all their life think they can get away with not washing short hair. And they were always wrong.

“I'm serious. You – ” _look like Loki_ , he was going to say, before remembering that that was no longer a safe target for teasing. “Have you never heard that cleanliness is next to godliness?”

Thor threw off the bed sheet and scoffed. “I _am_ a god, so whatever I am, be it clean or _not_ , is already godly. Get your thoughts clear, Banner.”

But he was up and moving towards the bathroom, covering his tracks with a loud dismissive noises that almost made him sound like his normal self.

Bruce started changing the sheets on the bed, trying and failing not to feel disoriented by the mundanity of the task.

Steam filled the bathroom and started drifting out of the open door, a sinuous visual enticement on par with the smell of a cartoon pie. Bruce momentarily gave up on wrestling with the fitted sheet and sat helplessly on the bare mattress, head in hands, mouthing _what the hell_ to himself on repeat.

* * *

**The Hulk**

After New York, there had been a brief bloom of Hulk fans. Kids drew pictures, street vendors hawked T-shirts. Someone even put a plaque up next to some of the remaining building scars on the Apollo in Harlem.

Bruce had found it all pretty disturbing. Luckily it didn't last.

Once people grew used to the idea of there being a whole universe of life out there, aliens and magic and a renewable source of terror for their morning click, their fear of the Hulk made a healthy and sane resurgence.

The Hulk was the Avengers' rabid dog, and Iron Man held the leash; people seemed comforted by any joint public appearance of Bruce and Tony. Their friendship was discussed in tabloids like a fraught affair, like the safety of North America hinged on how many times Bruce smiled at him across a cafe table.

They once gave a talk at a magnet school, and a teenage girl had asked him how the Hulk felt about Tony, her meaning communicated through giggles and blushing. Bruce went wordless from mortification while Tony made some glib comment to pass the moment. He laughed himself sick in the car afterwards.

The Hulk went deep under after the battle in Wakanda. Bruce couldn't tell if he was ashamed or scared and he didn't much care. He could feel him roiling down there, stealing forward in the night to torment Bruce with memories, or nightmares he prayed weren't memories.

Something was badly off in the balance between them, and when he thought about spending the rest of his life like this – for however long that would be – he felt nothing short of desperate.

* * *

“What's immortality like?” he asked early one morning.

They were both lying on the bed, not sleeping but not fully awake either. The sky outside the window was changeable, projecting looming cumulonimbus clouds, but he couldn't tell from looking at Thor if that had anything to do with him. He was always questioning the weather nowadays.

It took a few moments for Thor to answer. “After a particularly hard-fought victory on Alfheim, we held a feast that lasted five months. It's a little like that.”

“Feasts that last five months, huh. That sounds,” stressful, “interesting.” But what if you got stuck with a bad table partner, he wondered.

“My father,” Thor began, hesitant. “He was older than Midgard's recorded history. But he barely lasted four more years after my mother died.” He blinked over at Bruce. “So it's also like that.”

* * *

**Bruce**

Bruce had been weird about touching people since the accident, his need for human contact balancing against his paranoia of hurting someone and always coming up outclassed.

Something on Sakaaraltered the equation.

The first moments of coming back to himself were a haze of confusion and mismatched sensory readings, but he remembered feeling out of place in his own body. The proportions of his surroundings seemed drawn to the wrong scale.

Two years as the Hulk; his mechanism for self-regulation was clearly broken. It felt terrifyingly like those early days just after the accident, when he didn't know what would set the big guy off, and it felt like it might be anything and everything. Bruce couldn't go back to that. It led no where but to bullets that didn't do anything and long walks on the floor of an ocean. Spells of depression that lasted years.

Maybe it was instinct that had him reaching out. That old yearning for connection that had been trampled long ago by an asshole father but came back now in a desperate bid for survival. So he clung to Thor on that insane planet, and he hugged a baffled Tony in Central Park, broadcasting his intent as he approached, because he knew his friend had touch issues.

Thor, for his own part, didn't seem to notice anything strange in his sudden tactility. He never questioned his own welcome when putting his hands on Bruce's shoulders or face, and received his slightly less balanced return touches with a comprehensive unflappability. Thor's obliviousness made Bruce feel immediately less on-edge, like maybe he could hang on a little longer.

In a time when everyone in the world was in wounded retreat from one another, Bruce and Thor were drifting closer, purposeful but somehow also completely accidental.

* * *

One rainy day Bruce was hiding from the lab and its teeming population of technicians, and Thor rolled over in bed and sleepily pressed a kiss to his neck.

Strangely, his first thought was that no matter how long his life lasted, he would now forever know what it was like to be kissed by another man; it tickled. On account of the beard.

He glanced over and found Thor's eyes open and on him. They watched each other like that for a while, suspended in a state of alert curiosity.

There was nothing inevitable here. Bruce was years past this type of thing having any kind of natural progression. But then, he's a lab accident and Thor was a superpowered alien being – maybe natural was overrated. Maybe moving forward, despite doubts and the faint discomfort, was what they needed.

He reached out and lay his hand on the side of Thor's face; this much he has done before, on Sakaar and the Grandmaster's ship. Thor had been his touchstone, his one familiar thing. There was minute scarring along Thor's right eye; on anyone else, the wound would still be open and weeping. He swept his thumb carefully over it, and Thor's eyes closed. That made it easier for Bruce to dip forward and cover his mouth with his own.

Earth in its trauma was almost as alien as Sakaar now, and Thor was still solid and familiar and deeply strange.

His quiet hum seemed like a positive response so Bruce repeated the experiment.

They kissed languidly, like this was some lazy Sunday morning in bed and not a bunker at the end of the universe. Bruce felt the quiet stirrings of arousal and almost startled backwards, but Thor had his hand around the back of his neck by then, anchoring him, and it was just as easy to fall forward instead of back.

Eventually their kisses slowed until they were practically just resting against each other and Bruce said, “Okay,” because he was, in that moment, finally kind of okay. He could hear how breathless he sounded and took an almost savage satisfaction out it, this proof that he could still feel and act like a person.

And then Thor pulled resolutely away, strode over to the corner and grabbed his armor and new battleaxe, and left the room in a half-jog.

Sprawled out abandoned on his back, Bruce thought that was maybe a slight overreaction.

He'd wonder if maybe Asgard just didn't have any queer people, but he's _met_ Loki. And Thor had once commiserated with a very startled Steve on his long lost love the Winter Soldier going on the lam, so Bruce didn't think Thor had a problem with any of it. Also, he kissed him first.

Maybe Asgardians just did things like that?

A searing, oil-slick flash out of the window. Bruce was on his feet and across the room in an instant, staring dumbly down at the grounds, where the unmistakable mark of the bifrost was burned into the grass.

Thor was gone.

He tried to imagine explaining to the others that he'd made out with Thor and it caused him to flee the planet. Because Rhodey would ask. Their best chance at defeating Thanos – not to mention their only way of traveling off-world – just up and disappears? He was going to want some answers.

Bruce didn't know how long he stood there, feeling strangely detached and wondering when the breakdown would fully hit. Even the Hulk was very quiet.

Then a warning crackle lit up the sky again. Bruce instinctively shielded his eyes as the bifrost appeared. When he lowered his arm, three figures stood on the grass. He knew two of them.

He sprinted from the room.

By the time he got to the entrance hall, it was already thronged with people who'd heard that an Einstein-Rosen Bridge had appeared. Bruce beat the converging crowd out the door by mere seconds and raced barefoot across the lawn.

Tony looked rough, like he'd aged five years since Bruce saw him last; his beard hadn't been trimmed in days, his eyes were bloodshot, and his competent engineer's hands were maybe trembling.

He froze when he saw Bruce approaching; as he entered earshot, Tony asked, “Bruce, why aren't you wearing a shirt?”

He ignored the question. “Pepper's all right,” he called instead, as soon as he could, because he _knew_ Tony, and he knew he'd been right when his shoulders fell and he ducked his head to take a ragged breath, and then Bruce was colliding with him and they were hugging each other hard, never mind Bruce's lack of a shirt, because the world had ended but they were both miraculously still there.

After a few seconds: “Seriously, though, the clothes. I made a whole wardrobe so you wouldn't have to keep wandering around naked every time the other guy made an appearance. Why does no one appreciate my thoughtfulness?”

“How did you find him?” Bruce asked Thor over his shoulder.

Thor tossed his giant axe one-handed, looking maybe a little sheepish. “Thanos ordered his children to meet him on Titan. I only just remembered.”

In his peripheral vision, he saw Tony's face go slack with disbelief, and neatly turned him towards the compound as a distraction.

“ _Nebula_?” A few feet away, Rocket was stepping up to the blue woman. A second thick with studying each other and then the raccoon's voice, growing strident: “What? What do you know?” and Bruce stopped listening after that, because some moments deserved no audience.

He and Tony were going to have to compare their own tallies soon enough; Stephen Strange, after all, had not returned from Titan. But for now, he just wanted to hand Tony off to Rhodey, who'd appeared in the doorway and was staring out at them with very wide eyes.

For the first time since the deaths, they were allowed a small moment of grateful relief.

* * *

It was late when he returned to his rooms.

He wasn't sure what to expect, had been telling himself that he shouldn't expect anything. But when he saw a familiar bundle of armor sitting on the dresser in the corner, his breath left him in a relieved exhale.

He brushed his teeth and climbed into his side of the bed. Thor stirred and wordlessly slung an arm around him; Bruce reached down and curled a hand around his wrist.

Anchor set.

No dreams.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] leanover](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15123476) by [watery_weasel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/watery_weasel/pseuds/watery_weasel)




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